Wait I think I've heard this one... So, 40 pounds of liquid mercury walk into a bar, walks up to the bartender and says "Are you the legal guardian of John Connor?" then proceeds to form into a policeman and blow everybody's heads off.

There may have been some priests and a rabbi in there somewhere the details are a little blurry.

Liquid mercury is not very toxic, mostly because it's very hard to get your body to absorb it. Mercury vapors are quite toxic, but liquid elemental mercury is not very volatile. So, unless the guy dropped it into a hot frying pan, there is very little danger of these folks developing hydrargyria.

brap:Wait I think I've heard this one... So, 40 pounds of liquid mercury walk into a bar, walks up to the bartender and says "Are you the legal guardian of John Connor?" then proceeds to form into a policeman and blow everybody's heads off.

There may have been some priests and a rabbi in there somewhere the details are a little blurry.

Even as a liquid, mercury denser than lead: 40.0 pounds of mercury = 1.34 L. He probably had it in a 2-liter bottle. Probably handed it to somebody who had no idea how heavy it really was and dropped it.

Although it's dumb to play with it, mercury in that quantity has some tantalizing properties that are hard to resist. It's silver, shiny, liquid, really, really heavy and it doesn't act like anything else you've ever seen before. The inner monkey instinct kicks in hard, makes you want to poke it with sticks to see what it does.

My sixth grade science teacher brought in a small flask of mercury, probably 5 lbs worth. It was a sealed glass ampule, you couldn't do much but jiggle it, but the entire class was freaking mesmerized.